King's College London Department of Biophysics

Academic department

King's College London Department of Biophysics

1962-1989

The Department of Biophysics began as the Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Biophysics Research Unit, 1946, attached to the Department of Physics, with John Turton Randall as first Director. It moved into the purpose-built Wheatstone Physics Laboratory in the basement of the main King’s Building, 1952. Staff of the Unit published preliminary findings on the structure of DNA in the April 1953 edition of Nature, simultaneously with James Watson and Francis Crick, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. After years of further research, Maurice Wilkins was jointly awarded, with Watson and Crick, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1962. The Unit became the Department of Biophysics in 1962 and moved to new premises in Drury Lane in 1964, with research groups working on cilia and flagella, muscle structure, nucleic acid structure, nuclear and chromosome structure, and x-ray diffraction studies of DNA and RNA. Randall retired in 1970, and was succeeded by Maurice Wilkins, 1970-1981. In 1985 the Department was combined with Cell and Molecular Biology in the Faculty of Life Sciences and in 1989 was renamed the Randall Institute. The Institute was relocated in 2001 to New Hunt’s House, Guy’s Campus, as the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics, within the School of Biomedical Sciences.

Wilkins, Maurice Hugh Frederick, 1916-2004, molecular biologist (1916-2004)

King's College London Faculty of Life Sciences (1985-1989)

King's College London Faculty of Natural Science (1921-1985)

King's College London Medical Research Council Biophysics Research Unit (1946-1984)

KCL-AF1023

0100 KCLCA

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